The Most Savage (and Painfully Hilarious) The Emoji Movie Reviews

The Emoji Movie is not good. And by not good, I mean it's at six-percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. That means basically everyone hated it — and by everyone, I mean almost literally everyone. Here are the most scathing reviews on the internet.

1. New York Post: "Please restore my eyes to their factory settings. They have seen “The Emoji Movie,” a new exercise in soulless branding, aimed primarily at little kids. But where another product-focused flick, “The Lego Movie,” had cleverness and heart, this thing is a piece of app.

3. TimeOut: "Disregard that PG rating and keep your children far away from director Tony Leondis’ vile animated faux-comedy. Beneath its trippy surface lurks an insidious philosophy hazardous to impressionable minds. The Emoji Movie openly rolls its eyes at full-fledged thought, legitimizing poor communication skills by cheering on the decay of attention spans. Early on, a character gleefully declares, “Words aren’t cool!” Is that the ideology the screenwriters embraced? It’s a fair question."

I don't think I can say anything funny about this, because it makes me want to die.

4. The Verge: "The deus ex machina in this film is a Twitter icon. Jailbreak and Hi-5, stranded in The Cloud after Gene is kidnapped by some virus bots, use Jailbreak’s secret princess powers to summon an animated blue bird. It flies them back into the phone on its back. I don’t fucking know... I don't think I can say anything funny about this, because it makes me want to die."

5. RogerEbert.com: "The failure of imagination in “The Emoji Movie” is not limited to its depiction of the app world. This is a film that has literally nothing to offer viewers—there are no moments of humor, excitement or insight regarding a culture that considers emojis to be the pinnacle of contemporary communication. The actors go through their lines with such a lack of enthusiasm that they make Krusty the Klown seem focused and committed by comparison. The message about the importance of Being True To Yourself rings exceptionally hollow considering that there is not a single thing here that has not been blatantly taking from other, better films."

The Emoji Movie

6. The Village Voice: "Anyway, I’m not here to tell you that The Emoji Movie is somehow good if you see it through the eyes of a child or a parent. The second time around, it was still lousy, a shallow knock-off-cum-hybrid of Inside Out and The Lego Movie without any of the real-world resonances or inventiveness that make those works so electric. Pixar’s Inside Out has characters traveling through a metaphorical map of the human mind, a simple yet touching way to both explain and stir our emotions. The Lego Movie uses the tale of an anonymous plastic block in a regimented, prefab dystopia finding his individuality as a way to meditate on our hierarchical world, and even to question the mind of God. To put it mildly, you’re not going to find any of that here."

7. ScreenRant: "As should be clear now, The Emoji Movie is highly derivative of previous animated movies that anthropomorphized inanimate toys, digital objects and even emotions, but lacks the heart, wit and sense of craftsmanship that made those films successful. It may not arrive as shocking news, but The Emoji Movie ultimately comes across as little more than the crass attempt to cash-in on the popularity of smartphone technology that many thought it would be, when it was first announced. The juicebox crowd is no doubt the demographic most likely to get some joy out of the film’s many emoji-related puns and gags, but The Emoji Movie lacks crossover appeal otherwise."

8. The Guardian: "However, the most disturbing part of this toxic film is the way it infects audiences with its ugly cynicism. A viewer leaves The Emoji Movie a colder person, not only angry at the film for being unconscionably bad, but resentful of it for making them feel angry. A critic can accept the truth that art and commerce will spend eternity locked in opposition. Nevertheless it’s still startling to see art that cheers commerce on while being stamped in the face by its boots."

Do yourself a favor, and swipe left on this one.

9. Cinema Blend: "The Emoji Movie turned out to be an even worse idea in execution than it did on paper. Its characters are weak, its story lame, and its purpose unclear. Do yourself a favor, and swipe left on this one."

10. Vulture: "In the mock tradition of countless superior Pixar films before it, it’s attempting to sell a sense of childlike wonder and fascination with an ordinary, everyday object: your smartphone. And in doing so, it is one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen, much less one ostensibly made for children."

11. IndieWire: "The Emoji Movie is almost as bad and brutally depressing as everything else in 2017... Make no mistake, “The Emoji Movie” is very, very, very bad (we’re talking about a hyperactive piece of corporate propaganda in which Spotify saves the world and Sir Patrick Stewart voices a living turd), but real life is just too hard to compete with right now. Not even a gaudy monument to late capitalism that masquerades as children’s entertainment — a film that bends over backwards to teach your kids that true happiness is always just an app away — can measure up to what’s happening off-screen. Not even a witless cartoon that unfolds like a PG-rated remake of “They Live” as told from the aliens’ POV feels as toxic as glancing at your Twitter feed or (God forbid) turning on the television news."

Laura BeckLaura Beck is a Los Angeles-based TV writer and frequent contributor to Cosmopolitan.com — her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Jezebel, and the Village Voice.

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